Ayoayo

Game Board and Scores

Each player can be a human or the computer. By default, player B is human (you) and A is the computer (me).
Players take turns. The arrow shows whose turn it is.
In turn, each player clicks one of the six buttons (cups) in his/her row.
All the pieces are taken from the cup and one piece is put in each following cup, moving counter-clockwise.
If the last piece lands in a cup on the opponent's side, and if the cup contains 2 or 3 pieces, the pieces are captured and added to the score.
If the immediately preceding cup has 2 or 3 pieces, they are also captured, and so on.
The game automatically ends when a player has no pieces and cannot take his/her turn.
The winner is the player who captured the most pieces.
Press New to start another game.

Press Reset (or Reload or Refresh in your browser) to return the game to all original settings.
You can choose how many pieces each cup should start with (3 to 6 or random).
If the program is too slow for you, uncheck the Pause feature. All pieces will move immediately.
If the program hangs, click the Stop button of your browser.
If you want the computer to only make one move, first make sure the other player is human.

The computer chooses a cup using one of six strategies: random (the default), first, last, fullest, emptiest, or greedy.
The greedy strategies look ahead 1 to 5 moves to see which choice of cup would gain the most points. (greedy5 is slow.)
You can let the computer play against itself to see which strategies are best or worst.

This program uses Javascript 1.2, so it probably only works with Netscape Navigator 4 or Internet Explorer 4.
It does not work with Netscape on a Macintosh because button text cannot change.
Pause is just an empty loop (a hack) and may be slow on computers with slow processors.
Internet Explorer users should uncheck Pause, since the screen does not update until processing stops.
Internet Explorer sometimes hangs or crashes.
Internet Explorer button widths change, which is distracting.
There is no way to gray out buttons that should be disabled.
The program should disallow a move that will leave the opponent with no pieces if other moves are possible.
There is no option about who scores the remaining pieces when one player cannot move.

More information about Mankala games like Ayòayò is available on my Africa page.